


Son of Pyewacket

by Siria



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 06:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30102030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: In which Obi is a very good orange boy, but also something else.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 20
Kudos: 68





	Son of Pyewacket

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trinityofone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/gifts).



> A gift for [trinityofone]() on her birthday! Thanks to [Cate]() for looking over it for me.

It would have been one thing if Shane had come home to find a cat sitting on his doorstep—then he would have had some plausible deniability. Instead he opened his apartment door late on the night of his thirty-third birthday, keys jangling and an even tipsier Ryan stumbling at his heels, to find a cat sitting on the floor of his living room.

And even then Shane could have told himself that he must have left a window open and the cat had wandered in of its accord. But it was pretty tough to maintain denial in the face of not just a cat and a closed window, but also a cat bed, water bowl, and food dish.

"Dude, you got a _cat_?" Ryan said, sounding giddy.

"Looks like it," Shane said grimly. _Well, fuck_.

* * *

Shane's Oma had been a weird lady.

He didn't say that to be disrespectful—he'd loved her very much—but she hadn't behaved like the other kids' grandmas. She'd never baked, or played golf, or gone to Florida, or drunk gin, or come to any of Shane's games before his campaign of whining wore his parents down and they stopped making him play Little League.

She'd lived in a small white ranch house that looked like a carbon copy of every other mid-century home on every other block in that part of Chicagoland. The only difference was that Oma's house was almost swallowed up by a profusion of flowers and greenery so lush and colourful that passing motorists would sometimes slow down to stare. Oma had never seemed to spend any time tending to the garden, but birds flocked to it and bees lived in a hive that hummed in the branches of the oak tree that grew in one corner.

Shane couldn't have told you what exactly it was that his Oma _did_ all day, but every time he'd gone to visit he'd always had the sense that she'd just packed something away out of sight.

And maybe that might not seem a lot, maybe that might make Shane seem like a particularly judgemental ten-year-old, but let him also submit into evidence the fact that pretty much every time he went to her house, Oma'd inspect his tongue and measure his arms and legs with a bright yellow tape measure that didn't have any numbers or markings on it. She'd hold the tape measure up to the light and frown at whatever she saw there and say, "Well, no shame in being a late bloomer. And you're a boy. Sometimes it takes a boy a while to grow into it."

* * *

_It_ being magic.

But then Oma had died when Shane was eleven and by the time he was a teenager he'd convinced himself that she'd been weird in a bad way, strange and embarrassing, because no one rational could believe in magic and he knew better. By the time he was in his twenties, he was—he hoped—a little bit less of a self-righteous idiot, and had come to think that Oma hadn't really believed in anything she'd said to him. It was harmless make-believe, like when parents told their kids that the presents under the tree were there courtesy of Jolly Old Saint Nick—a tall tale that was told in the hope it would spark a sense of wonder.

And now Shane was thirty-three and a certified grown-up, with an apartment and a boyfriend and a career on the internet that his Midwestern moderate Republican parents viewed with benign confusion, and, apparently, a cat familiar which had manifested itself because he'd finally made his way through magical puberty.

How did he know this, you might ask? Well, tucked inside the cat bed was a small, thick book bound in battered brown leather. The cramped, old-fashioned writing on the first page proclaimed it to be a "compendium of true and accurate magical wisdoms." This was the kind of thing that would ordinarily make Shane either snort or say carefully that other people were free to believe what they believed, depending on who he was talking to. It was just that the book was written entirely in German, and before today Shane's vocabulary in that language didn't extend beyond _Ich heiße Shane_ , _der Senf_ , and _Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof_.

Now he could read it—now he could _understand_ it—and Shane found himself kneeling on his living room floor and very deliberately trying not to have a panic attack.

 _Eine Panikattacke_.

"Did you name him after _Star Wars_?" Ryan said from his perch on the sofa.

Shane looked over at him, blinking in confusion. "Huh?"

"Obi?" Ryan replied, tapping at the small golden tag which dangled from the cat's collar. "I guess he doesn't look like a Han, and he's _definitely_ not a Luke."

"No," Shane said slowly, "guess not."

* * *

The face that stared back at Shane from the bathroom mirror while he brushed his teeth looked much the same, and his bedroom ceiling didn't seem any different when he stared up at it, sleepless, with Ryan already snoring softly next to him. He held up his hands and turned them this way and that in the streetlight that filtered in around the curtains. No sparks of magic flickered around them; no wand materialised within their grasp. They were ordinary hands, belonging to an ordinary man, who statistically had a bit more leg than you might expect but otherwise was a perfectly average person.

Sure, the cat currently curled up in his living room was worrying, and his newfound ability to understand the lyrics to "99 Luftballons" inexplicable, but Shane hadn't actually done anything magical, supernatural, preternatural, paranormal, or even a little bit spooky in the last twenty-four hours or so. What he had done was drink quite a bit of tequila and sing karaoke and eat an awful lot of loaded nachos and then drink something _very_ pink that Jen had given him before he'd made out with Ryan in a booth in the back of whatever bar they'd finished the night in.

Shane clung to that thought as he drifted off to sleep. He was drunk and maybe had some mild botulism from those nachos. The cat was a shared delusion and his Oma had just wanted him to believe in Santa or whatever.

In the morning, it would all be fine.

* * *

In the morning, it was not fine.

* * *

His Oma's familiar—or so she'd said—had been a small wire-haired mongrel called Schnucki with one eye and a perpetual air of being very, very over it. Shane had only vague memories of the dog, which had never wanted to play or explore the garden with him, or even expressed much interest in treats. The only person Schnucki had seemed at all interested in was Oma, following around at her heels and sleeping at the foot of her bed every night.

Schnucki had gone missing the day that Oma died, and was never seen again.

Obi didn't seem particularly interested in Shane at all—hadn't tried to get into the bedroom during the night, didn't follow him across the hallway when he shuffled into the bathroom the next morning to brush his teeth and wish for one of those hangover IV cures they'd tried out back in the Buzzfeed days.

But when Shane went into the kitchen in search of caffeine and approximately a vat-sized amount of oatmeal, he realised two things in quick succession.

First, that a yawning Ryan with bedhead, dressed only in a pair of Shane's too-long boxers as he got some coffee brewing, straddled the line between _cute_ and _hot_ in a way that Shane was going to have to unpick in the privacy of his own mind later—like, was it the domestic bit that got him going or the possessive thing of seeing Ryan in his clothes?

Second, though, and for now far more pressing was the fact that Obi was hovering in mid-air right behind Ryan's shoulder, as if curious to see what he was up to. Obi didn't seem at all concerned by the fact that he was six feet off the ground and _levitating_ , but Shane could feel his whole respiratory system seize up, and he knew that if Ryan turned around and saw a flying cat, he'd scream so loud he'd be heard from here to San Bernardino.

No matter how you looked at it, this was a pickle.

 _This is not fine_ , part of Shane's brain was insisting. _That cat is downright defying a basic law of physics_. But another part of it, a part that Shane didn't think he'd ever consciously been aware of before, was saying, _I know how to manage this_. He knew the words to whisper under his breath, the shape to sketch in the air with his fingers, and Obi was turning and padding through thin air before perching, with persnickety finesse, on Shane's shoulder.

He'd been summoned—Shane had _summoned his cat familiar_ —and when Ryan turned around a moment later to hand him a mug of coffee and made a joke about Shane looking like a wannabe pirate with a substitute parrot on his shoulder, even Shane could tell that his laughter had a tinge of the hysterical to it.

* * *

Shane could feel it building, was the thing.

The more he was in contact with Obi—the more that cat wound around his ankles or curled up by his side—the more Shane could feel something building up inside him. It was like a fidget and a fizzy soda had had a baby and it had taken up residence inside of him. Probably in something glandular. By mid-morning, Shane's toes were tapping with it, his scalp tingling, and when he walked into the kitchen, he found that the fridge and the silverware drawer opened as soon as he thought about making a start on lunch.

"Okay, just so you know," Shane said, looking down at Obi, who was sitting next to his foot, "if any foodstuffs get reanimated and start talking to me, I'm out of here. That shit might fly with Disney, but I draw the line at sentient romaine."

The cat blinked at him; the lettuce remained, reassuringly, lettuce.

But still. "Fuck," Shane said as he put together a salad and found that, somehow, he knew how to mix up a dressing while completely independently a knife chopped up a variety of vegetables. "I mean, this is pretty solid evidence, but he's going to be absolutely fucking insufferable. Did you _have_ to show up?"

Obi yawned up at him, showing off a set of neat, white, impeccably sharp teeth, and then curled up for a nap. Trust a cat not to be perturbed by being the tangible manifestation of its owner's late-blooming magical abilities.

"Christ," Shane said.

* * *

Shane dropped the bowls and silverware onto the dining table with a thunk and then went back into the kitchen to fetch some drinks.

"Ugh, health food?" Ryan said as he sat down. "I know you're old now, but does that mean the rest of us have to suffer?"

"It's got chickpeas in it," Shane said, returning with two glasses of water, "so it's bound to be a gustatory delight. Plus some dude called Brad commented on the recipe to say 'all right I guess' in caps lock and far be it from me to second-guess the wisdom of a Brad.

"Besides, you're going to be needing those extra vitamins and minerals," Shane continued, because he knew he personally was going to be eating crow for a while after this, and because Ryan had just started in on his first mouthful of salad, "on account of how magic is real."

Shane was mildly impressed with just how thoroughly Ryan choked on his food—he was pretty sure one chickpea shot all the way across the room and bounced off the front door.

"The fuck?" Ryan said, when he'd stopped coughing and wasn't quite so red in the face. "If this is a bit—"

"Not a bit," Shane said, spreading his hands wide. "One hundred per cent serious."

"You, Shane Madej, world's greatest sceptic—"

"I mean, I don't know if I'd say _world's greatest_ , but—"

"Is there a camera hidden somewhere?" Ryan made a show of looking around. "This is for a—"

"Nope," Shane said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands in his lap. He was trying to project earnest calm but he wasn't sure if he was succeeding. "Pretty sure I got the extra ironic kind of magic, so I only came into it when I turned 33, and this guy"—he pointed down at Obi—"was sent from the spirit of my dead witch grandma or something and he's really the embodied personification of my magical ability. He floats."

Ryan stared at him, eyes wide, before reaching out and pressing one hand to Shane's forehead. "No temperature, are you—are you feeling okay? You didn't take anything last night you shouldn't have? Or, or leave your drink down somewhere?"

"I'm fine," Shane said, "I'm just magic, apparently." He tilted his head back and contemplated the ceiling. Could the cat float that high if it wanted? Could he? "Well actually, to be completely honest, I think I'm so freaked out that I feel fine, but I'm just sort of... Um." He looked down at his hands. They were trembling.

"Should I call someone?" Without Shane quite registering it, Ryan had moved so that he was hunkered down next to Shane's chair, Shane's hands in his and a look of real concern in his eyes. "Your parents or... maybe we should bring you to get you checked out somewhere, huh? Fuck, dude, if this is a bit, tell me now or I'll—"

"Not a bit," Shane said. "Watch." He twitched his nose and made the salt cellar levitate.

"Okay," Ryan said, sounding a bit wobbly now himself. "So that's—I mean there are draughts in here sometimes so—"

"Oh for god's sake," Shane said, " _now_ you're interested in logical hypotheses?" He tugged his hands free of Ryan's and found that he instinctively knew how to call the spell book to him. It shot across the room from the coffee table and plopped itself into his lap where it fell open, the pages turning themselves until they stopped at one in particular.

 _A working_ , Shane read, _to restore calm after storms both large and small_.

He couldn't tell if the book was trying to be helpful or sarcastic. Knowing his luck, maybe both.

After a long pause, Ryan said, "Not a bit."

"Not a bit," Shane confirmed.

"Magical cat," Ryan said.

"Yup," Shane said.

"A witch for a grandmother," Ryan said, and there was something building in his tone now, a hysteria-tinged pissiness that Shane was honestly kind of vibing with.

"I mean, that's what she _claimed_."

Ryan went back to sit in his chair. "We worked together for years on a show about trying to prove the existence of the supernatural, something that you told me I was crazy to believe in over and over, and this _whole time_ you had a witch grandmother?"

"Well, she's been dead for twenty years," Shane pointed out.

"That," Ryan said, "is so not the point, dude." There were splotches of colour riding high on his cheekbones.

"Maybe not," Shane conceded. "But to be fair, I never did a lick of magic before today. And I just thought Oma was telling untruths to a minor, not, you know... being whatever the hell she was."

Ryan stared at him for a long moment. "And now you're a witch?"

"I guess? Or a... guy... witch? Or is that some gendered bullshit?" Shane stared down at his hands, at the book in his lap. "I'm a witch," he tried out. It felt weird, like saying, _I'm a Smurf_ or _I think people are a bit tough on Ted Cruz_.

"I always thought I'd be more freaked out to be like, knowingly in the presence of a supernatural whatever," Ryan said.

"A supernatural _whatever_?" Shane said, feeling vaguely affronted. He might be a witch—a warlock? what was the difference?—but he certainly wasn't a _whatever_.

"But honestly?" Ryan continued, shifting a little in his seat, the heat back in his cheeks once more, "I think I'm just sort of... uh, sort of turned on? Finding out that you can do, um... Things?"

"Huh," Shane said. "Well, we can work with that."

They could, and did—twice, even. And afterwards, lying on the floor with Ryan's head on his shoulder and the cat watching them placidly from its perch on the coffee table, Shane was glad he'd taken his time to grow into his magic after all.


End file.
